Posts Tagged ‘C++’

“Concepts” was a proposed C++0x feature that was supposed to make generic programming more enjoyable. The intention was to render many guru-level “template tricks” superfluous, produce much better compile-time error messages and provide “modular type checking” so errors can be caught early (even before a template is instantiated).

Fact 1: Concepts have been removed from the C++0x standardization effort. See Doug Gregor’s blog post.

Fact 2: C++0x still includes a whole lot of other core language and library features.

This article is about writing efficient code and giving the compiler opportunities for optimizations with respect to copying / “moving” objects in good old C++98. I use a simple function as an example but it should extend to other cases as well. The technique that is described here (“swaptimization”) is not entirely new and I can’t take credit for it. But it is probably little-known which is a good reason to write about it. :-)

If found a very nice article about rvalue references and move semantics (primarily) by Dave Abrahams. It also considers return value optimizations, exception safety and in what state an object should be left in after its resources have been “stolen”. Here it is.

[Edit 2009-08-18: The link doesn’t seem to work anymore. However, Dave Abrahams has started to refine, extend, and convert it into a series of blog posts on his new site]

Occasionally I happen to see a piece of C++ code from an eager author that tries to utilize rvalue references but doesn’t understand them and gets it wrong. I remember that I had trouble fully grasping the rvalue reference concept. But now, it seems like that was way in the past. I can hardly remember why it was so difficult to understand rvalue references.

It may have something to do with the sources people use to learn about this feature. For example I wouldn’t consider the C++0x wikipedia article to be a good introduction for rvalue references. It seems too short for that. But this wikipedia article is a nice overview of what kind of features can be expected.

Since the C++ compiler of GCC 4.3.2 comes with partial C++0xsupport and I had not tested all of these features yet, I decided to do a little finger exercise: “function”.

“function” is a useful library feature of Boost, TR1, and the upcoming C++ standard library. It’s basically a class template mimicing the behaviour of a function pointer. But it’s much more flexible because it applies to any “callable object” — function pointers and objects with overloaded function call operator. Also, the signatures don’t have to match perfectly as long as the parameters and return values are implicitly convertible. I’m going to show you how this library feature can be implemented with C++0x features — including variadic templates and rvalue references. But before going into any details let me give an example of how code that uses this “function” library might look like. In case you’re already familiar with this library feature you can skip the following piece of code and paragraph of text.

Although an rvalue is allowed to bind to a reference-to-const, the C++ standard allows a compiler to copy an rvalue to another temporary rvalue before binding it to a reference-to-const. Obviously, you need to have a public copy constructor for that.

I really fail to see the merit in this rule. It seems that every available C++ compiler does not create an extra temporary object here and some of these compilers don’t even bother to report an error in this situation (g++ version 3.4.5 accepts the above code).

Fortunately, the upcoming version of the C++ standard removes the CopyConstructible requirement for reference binding. It makes the code above well-formed.

I already said it once in another post but I think it deserves to be mentioned again: Don’t underestimate the usefulness of good books about C++! Prefer buying a good book over searching the internet for tutorials, examples, explanations if you want to learn the language and/or learn about useful idioms, guidelines, etc…

I recently added two other books to my personal library: “Effective C++” and “C++ Coding Standards”. It took me only 3 weeks to finish both books. That means they were interesting and insightful. :-)